Starcrossed
by Regency
Summary: AU. Unbeknownst to her, Mission Commander Samantha Carter of the space shuttle Intrepid has just met the last man she'll ever love. Spoilers for Stargate: Continuum. Astronaut!Sam/Jack.


Author: Regency  
Title: Star-crossed  
Fandom: _Stargate SG-1_ (passing crossover with _Farscape_)  
Pairing: Sam/Jack, implied past Sam/John Crichton UST  
Spoilers:_ Stargate: Continuum_ and general series knowledge  
Warnings/Contains: AU  
Word count: ~2,200  
Summary: Unbeknownst to her, Mission Commander Samantha Carter of the space shuttle Intrepid has just met the last man she'll ever love.  
Author's Notes: Written for the **stargateland** Big Bang challenge.  
Disclaimer: I don't own any characters recognizable as being from _Stargate SG-1_ or _Farscape_. They are the property of their actors, producers, writers, and studios, not me. No copyright infringement was intended and no money was made in the writing or distribution of this story. It was good, clean fun.

* * *

She could tell by the disbelief in his voice that she'd been the first to make him laugh in a while. He shook his head, but he didn't leave. It would have been easy to end the conversation; they were thousands of miles apart, after all. Cut the uplink and that was the end of any and all contact between them. It would have been easy and Sam was unaccountably glad that Jack O'Neill didn't seem to have much use for easy. They had that in common.

"So," he drawled in that accent of his, "what's a nice astronaut like you doing talking to a grunt like me?" His ever-present self-deprecation had struck again. _No one will ever say he's a narcissist_.

"Having a good time," she retorted and meant it. His eyebrows flicked toward the ceiling with skepticism. She figured he wasn't a man to believe he made good company. She thought he got himself wrong on a lot of counts. He was no Rodney McKay – though no one was and she thanked god for that every day – but he had a brilliance all his own. He'd lightened her mood threefold each time they'd spoken and he wasn't afraid to try and make her laugh. He was sort of fantastic at it, really, even if the jokes were mostly awful.

"Now, you're just putting me on, Colonel."

She beamed innocently into the camera for a long moment, knowing that with the time lag it'd take a second to reach him. "I'd never dream of it, Jack."

His smile back was just as long. "I know." Scarily enough, she believed he did. She got the sense that he was reading her like a book over the live feed. _ I must have an interesting plot, he keeps turning the pages._ She ignored that little voice that murmured, _'he can turn my pages anytime_' out of propriety. There were many things Sam could get away with doing; she doubted propositioning another officer via satellite uplink from Earth's orbit was on the list.

"So…" He reached beyond the bounds of the screen and came back with a star-shaped slinky to bounce between his hands. It spun and danced, always on the edge of irrevocable entanglement, just missing the mayhem. He started to whistle what she recognized at The _Simpsons_' theme song as accompaniment to his spectacle.

Sam could only watch him disappear into his own little world of distraction from her seat, strapped into place in the shuttle's zero-grav environment. Moments like these, she wondered how he'd survived Special Ops as long as he had. Then the slinky went up, came down, and landed upright and squared-away on the desktop as if he'd planned it just that way. His self-satisfied smirk said he had and it vanished without eulogy into the desk's middle drawer.

She couldn't help teasing him for it anyway. "Having fun yet?"

"With you? Always."

She wasn't blushing, but she was close. He had a way with words when he wanted to. "Same here."

"So…," he sucked thoughtfully at his lip, "when ya heading back?"

Sam sighed, a little happy and a little sad at the thought. "Couple of days. Can't believe all that time went by so fast, can you?" They'd been in a stable orbit around the planet for two days since returning for the International Space Station. They'd have been back sooner, but Houston had informed Sam of some last minute repairs that had to be made to make _Intrepid _ready to withstand re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. An undesired setback, yeah, but from where Sam was sitting, not too bad.

He tsked, "Nope. Seems like just yesterday you and yours were taking off for the wild black yonder and I didn't even know who you were." He wore that little look of consternation he got when he had something to say but didn't know how. It was her favorite look of his, though she'd never tell him that.

"What are you thinking," she asked in a metaphorical poke. He could live in his head as well as any genius. She wondered what it looked like in there, what wild and foul things lurked. He was a minefield and one she was starting to think of as her own. _Scary thought. _But she still couldn't stop smiling.

"Just…" He knocked on the desk distractedly. "This is gonna sound," he waved a slightly frantic hand in the air, but continued, "weird, I guess, but I'd really like to take you out for coffee or something. You know, when you get back…here. On Earth." He was rambling and she didn't care.

Sam squeezed her handholds and regulated her breathing. O2 scrubbers only worked so fast. Didn't help, she still felt lightheaded. "Oh."

Confused again, but hopeful, she saw. "'Oh' as in 'no' oh? Or 'oh' as in—"

" 'Oh' as in 'yes,' Jack. Oh as in yes. Take me for coffee." She'd wanted him to make some move like this for so long she couldn't play hard to get. Sam had always hated mind games. Jack looked so suddenly relieved, Sam could only blink and wonder what she'd missed. _Maybe I haven't been the only one waiting._

He answered her unspoken thought with his signature mischievous grin. "I was hoping you'd say that. Didn't want to have to beg. Hate begging. Hate it."

She smirked, "Damn, should have waited." She'd have to make him beg some other time, then. _Down, girl._

"There's still time." _Mind reader. _ He sat back, that satisfied smirk firmly in place and watched her. He didn't say another word, though his eyes said thousands. She wished he was here, right next to her so that he could show her what he didn't know how to say. She wished he was here so that she could show him what propriety stifled.

Jack O'Neill was something else, something entirely different than she'd ever known. Hell, she hadn't known him at before setting foot on the Space Station. They'd never touched, never met, never so much as shook hands. Yet, here they were. Sam had the terrifying feeling that she was falling for a stranger, one who didn't seem so strange at all.

"Now, what are _you _thinking," he asked in return.

Her smile was nothing short of a grin and she knew it. The suspicious glint in his eye told her he saw it, too. She was getting to be damned good at reading the Book of O'Neill, maybe as good as he was at reading her. It was fast becoming the best book on the shelf.

"About you."

He leaned toward the web camera with interest. "Nice things?"

"Yup."

He narrowed his eyes. "Happy things?"

Sam's heart skipped a beat when he began leering at her, "Yes." _I should keep him from saying what he's thinking, shouldn't I?_ He was as predatory as any wolf and she was the delighted prey. _What I wouldn't give to be on Earth right now. _ She was this close to hanging up her spacesuit for good. Earth was becoming more enticing by the hour.

"Inappropriate things?"

She cleared her throat, embarrassedly. Welch, her mission payload manager, was smirking off to the side and undoubtedly filing away Sam's discomfort for later ribbing. She was used to it by now.

"More and more," she answered simply. For a man she'd never laid hands on, he had the ability to fill her head up with the most exhausting dreams. Even John Crichton—_may he rest in peace_, she thought—had never done that and he'd been the sort of man who should have been able to. His disappearance had wounded her, as had thoughts of what they might have had if he'd returned from his last mission, but she'd grieved and she'd learned to let go. The thought of letting Colonel Jack O'Neill go was oddly more distressing than that.

"Nice," he remarked all puffed up chest and pride, the epitome of a peacock on the prowl. It was a cuter image than it had any right to be. Who was she kidding, so was he.

"So," she started, feeling Welch's eye burning into the side of her neck, "I should work."

"You mean you should let someone else use the uplink?" Sam was immediately suspicious. He looked inordinately pleased with himself for knowing shuttle rotation schedules that well. Sam figured Welch and other members of the flight crew had been giving him the skinny on her habits. She was probably gonna have to bust some heads together for that. _Not that they're totally wrong…not exactly._

She murmured guiltily, "I don't use it that much."_ Welch is laughing pretty hard back there. She's at the front of the line._

He conceded, "Hey, I'm not judging you. If you didn't I wouldn't get to talk to you nearly as much and then where would I be?"

She pretended to give it some thought. "Oh, I don't know, off being productive? Don't you have mission reports you should be finishing?"

Jack raised an objecting, indignant finger. "Hey, I got an extension on those. They're not late yet, so they don't count."

"Uh-huh, and that extension ends when?"

He stared off guiltily to the left, where Sam was positive his calendar was supposed to be. "Uh, last…_Wednesday_? Yikes, that's gonna cost me."

Sam rolled her eyes. _ Give him a hundred security codes and he remembers them all, but he can't write a mission report on time. _ If she'd been his aide, she might have strangled him. "Probably so."

"So, I'll go…work and you'll go…work, and we'll both be working. Sounds good."

"Yeah, it does." It didn't and neither of them thought so, but the world kept turning even when they weren't speaking. So, work it was.

"I guess I'll just let you go, then." He didn't so much as lift his hand toward the off-switch. Neither did she.

"That's probably a good idea." Sam was about to turn it off, really, she was. She just wanted to look at him a little while longer: brown eyes and that smile. He really was something else.

"Bye, Sam." It hurt when he said that and she wasn't quite sure why.

"Bye, Jack." He tossed her a little wave and he was gone. She missed him already. As she unhooked herself and floated to the next workstation, she wondered if he missed her, too. Something told her the answer was definitely yes.

"_Bye, Jack_," Welch mimicked in a high-pitched chirp as she drifted by. If it wouldn't have sent them careening into the nearest control panel, Sam definitely would have kicked her ass. She couldn't help it if she liked talking with the man. It was just so easy. _You hope he's easy all right. _ It was so true, she could have sighed. She really couldn't wait to get home again and for the first time in years, she didn't mean her brother's couch.

_Jack O'Neill won't know what hit him_. She was looking forward to being able to shave again and to trying that little lingerie shop Janet kept insisting they visit when she was planetside. It was going to be amazing, she just knew it. Call it her gut instinct, but Sam Carter was positive that things were only looking up from here. A career she loved and a man she cared for waiting on the ground. What could possibly go wrong?

To think she owed it all a little government program she liked to call Space in the Classroom. If she hadn't met Charlie O'Neill student-teaching his first class, she never would have met his father. Her own funny, easily-distracted minefield. Had NASA not, in typical fashion, waited until the last second to okay the in-class linkup, her feed wouldn't have come online just in time to watch Jack pinch-hitting for Show and Tell. Engaging and handsome in his Formal Dress Uniform, she'd been impressed. When they spoke after the presentation had ended, she'd been charmed. He knew a little bit about everything, especially the stars. _Not so simple a man_, she thought, whatever he claimed.

For a change, she was grateful for the ineffectiveness of bureaucracy. Without it, she might never have found him and that was a reality she could no longer imagine.

"Get over it, Sam. He's not that cute," Welch goaded from the communication bay.

Sam settled into her new station without deigning to answer that remark. It was a little soon to get herself reprimanded fighting for Jack's honor. _But if she keeps this up on Earth, all bets are off._

This man she hardly knew was getting to her and, secretly, she loved it. She thought it was funny that the person she'd been idly searching for all along was closest when he was so far away.

Groaning, she dropped her head onto the console. She had it bad.

Welch started quietly whistling the wedding march as she worked.

"Oh, god, kill me now." She didn't bother lifting her head; she knew this was just the beginning.

It was going to be a long trip home.


End file.
